


It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

by jazzypizzaz



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Baseball, Canon Compliant, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 10:20:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11553171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzypizzaz/pseuds/jazzypizzaz
Summary: Kira and Jake attend a baseball game together.  The war's over, but their hearts aren't yet healed.





	It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magnetgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnetgirl/gifts).



> title is a yogiism courtesy of Yogi Berra, 20th century American baseball player.

“Tag him!  Tag him out!  He’s right in front of your--” Kira cuts off her yelling with a groan and throws her hands into the air.  “Another point to the Yankees, unbelievable.”

Around the oval stadium, a small scattering of holographic humans either grumble or cheer according to their affiliations.  Kira snaps her bubblegum -- a satisfying Earth habit that required a stream of Federation PSAs about proper etiquette after it was introduced on the station -- then side-eyes the sullen figure on her right.

Slouched back in the bleachers Jake Sisko almost seems small, despite his long limbs sprawled over the seats.

“What do you call it when they tag one out and then the other?” Kira asks, nudging Jake a bit.  “Double play?”

“Also known as ‘turning two’ or a ‘twin killing.’”  Jake recites in a monotone.  Kira’s other attempts at conversation have all fallen flat, but reciting baseball trivia is a Sisko-specific involuntary function.  “A pitcher’s best friend.”

“Ah, right.  Wish the Kings would do that.  And -- Oh!”  Kira jumps to her feet, but the infielders don’t throw the hit in fast enough and the batter makes it to first base without trouble.   “I thought he was going to strike that one out, but now they’re going to load up the bases again.  This pitcher --”

“Is a left-handed specialist, for Jackson at bat, but also a total beanballer.  And his curveballs don’t quite float like they should.”  Jake, still leaned back, stares at the simulated puffy clouds in the sky above.  He hasn’t so much as glanced at the field in an over an hour.

Kira gives a low whistle.  “Whatever you call it, it sure doesn’t look good for the Kings.  Do you think they can pull it off?”

“They lose.  This game happened in 2042; it’s ancient history by now.  So don’t bother getting worked up about it.”  Jake grumbles.  He gives a heavy sigh that threatens to pull Kira down with him.  

“Hey!” Kira says, the word cutting sharp and hard, like the loud crack of a wooden bat exiling a ball out to left field.  

 Jake jerks his head towards her, straightening his spine by instinct.  

 Kira clears her throat and continues, but irritation and impatience still resurface through her attempts at a more gentle approach.  “I didn’t drag you out here, _you_ invited _me_.  So if you don’t want to watch the game anymore, that’s fine.  Prophets know I’ve got more than enough to do these days.”  

Jake blinks at her a moment, then shrugs, staring down at his hands.  “Nog says I’m not allowed to eat dinner alone when he works evenings.”

“You haven’t even touched your hot dog.”   She gestures to the abandoned human delicacy on his lap, the grease of the sausage soaking through the flimsy paper tray.

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

Kira gives Jake a onceover, noticing the way the loose fabric of the Niners jersey bunches around his gangly torso.  It doesn’t look quite right on him.

“What’s Kasidy up to tonight?  You could have invited her; she can at least tell the difference between a ‘high cheese’ and a ‘knuckleball.’”

“She’s keeping busy.  Getting on with her life.  You know, building the house, preparing for the baby, making future plans for the _Xhosa_.”  Jake picks at the hot dog, taking a bite.  He chews, then shrugs.  “I thought maybe you were like me, is all.  That’d you’d understand.”

“Understand what?” Kira says, baffled.  

She realizes: the baggy shirt doesn’t fit Jake because it’s not his own.

“Nevermind, it’s fine.”  Jake sighs and straightens up.  He squints out at the field, giving a rallying effort to pay attention.  “The Kings lose in the end, but the way they play this next inning almost makes that worth it.  That’s what Da-- what he’d always say, when we watched this one...”  

 Jake trails off, then starts again.  “Okay, so see the guy on third --”

“It’s not the same is it,” Kira interrupts, realization falling into place like a fly ball into a third baseman’s well-placed glove.  

 She does understand.

An evening like this, Kira might have gone dancing at Vic’s, twirled in time to _Fly Me to the Moon,_ with Odo in his tux smiling fondly at her.  Sisko would have been running the station alongside her, instead of Kira scrambling by herself to coordinate immediate post-war relief efforts while also hiring new staff to fill the gaps.

And Jake might have attended this game with his father instead, Ben wearing that same jersey Jake has currently buried himself in.

“No, it’s not the same,” Jake says, breathing out.  The tenseness in his shoulders eases.  “Nothing is.”

“For one we’re in the late twenty-fourth century not the early twenty-first,” Kira says.  Jake opens his mouth, but she holds up her hand: _I’m not done.  Trust me_.  “Unlike the people that attended this game first-hand, here in the holosuite we know the future -- we know who wins and loses, and by how much.  Or you do at least...  But the two of us still showed up to watch the game anyway.  For entertainment, drama, whatever.”

“Not very linear is it,” Jake says with a wry smile.  It fades quickly.  Jake slumps back to stare out at the clouds, arms across his chest wrapped up tightly in the jersey.  “But no matter how often I’ve seen this one, the Kings still lose.  It’s all kinda pointless is all.  I shouldn’t have bothered.  Sorry for wasting your time.”

Kira shakes her head.  “It was the year after Buck Bokai retired, and the line-up was all screwed up.  The team didn’t mesh very well, and baseball was from a bygone era by that point.  But the Kings rebuilt after that, you know.”

“But no one cared anymore.  Only two hundred people attended this game, a final in the World Series.”  Jake gestures to the cavernous empty stands.  “They forgot what it was like.”

Kira shrugs, looking around at the scattered clumps of attendees.  “Not everyone.”

A grey-haired couple sit a few rows back from them, dressed in Kings paraphernalia from head to toe complete with pendants.  Across the stadium are a large cluster of guys, wearing paint across their chests instead of shirts to spell out “Go Yanks!”  To the left of Kira and Jake, a father has a child on his lap, pointing out players on the field to her with patient explanation.

Kira turns back to look Jake in the eye.  “Not you and me.  We haven’t forgotten.”

“I suppose.”  Jake look out past the field.  The corners of his mouth twitch on his sunken face.  “Hey, so you weren’t sure what a double play was called, but you remember all that about this era of Kings history a couple hundred years ago?  For a silly old Earth sport?”

“Sure.  I spent a lot of time around your father,” Kira jokes.  “Plus team management isn’t so different from my job on the station.  Those are the parts that stick with me, from all his little monologues about life lessons in baseball.”

“There’s a lot of people that left the station, after the war.”  The brief spark of engagement that Jake had fades as he slips back into melancholy.

So many people aren’t at DS9 anymore, with Kira and Jake.

They sought new jobs elsewhere, to heal from the combat.  Moved back to their home planets.  Volunteered to rebuild planetside, to reshape their society’s future.

Many of them died also, of course.  

And one ascended into the wormhole.

Kira nods.  “A lot of new faces.  It won’t be the same, but we’ll rebuild. We’ll be back swinging again in no time.”  She hopes.  That’s what life is after all, or what she knows of it --  adapting to a series of continual losses, fighting to make it all worthwhile anyway.

There’s a brief moment of action as a fly ball is hit into the stands, and the audience scrambles to catch it.  Kira and Jake watch quietly.  The excitement of event washes over them as if from a long distance away, more like the crackling of an ancient Earth AM radio than a live-simulated hologame.

“I didn’t even want to come to this station at first,” Jake says.  Kira has to lean closer to hear him.  “Some hunk of alien metal in the middle of nowhere, away from any friends I made before, maybe no other kids on the station?  I didn’t get it.  Why would we move here.  But after my mom... it’s not like we could go back to the Saratoga.”

“I didn’t want to be here either my first year.”  Kira screws up her face.  It was so long ago.  “Well, that’s not quite right.  I didn’t want _Starfleet_ to be here.”

A small chuckle escapes from Jake.  It’s genuine, a welcome sound, but hollow as if from disuse.

“We didn’t turn out to be so bad though, did we?”

Kira grins.  “You have your moments.”

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be either,” Jake admits.  “Not after a while.  I met Nog.  Riska.  Mardah.  Got to know you and everyone on the crew.  But --” Jake takes a deep breath, and a small crease disrupts his forehead, “-- I had my father.  No matter what happened, I always had him.  It wasn’t as hard, that way.”

Kira doesn’t know what to say to that.  Reassuring Jake that Ben will come back or that he’ll always be with them in their hearts or that the Prophets have a plan they should trust -- she believes all this without question, but knows that it would sound like empty comfort to Jake.

It’d be like him telling her that Odo could return to the station tomorrow.  That he’ll decide that he’s had enough of being among his people, that he’s fed up with them already, that there’s a chance he could undo decades of insular toxicity overnight, and that by morning he’ll be back in her arms, for Kira to love and hold.

Possible, but closer to a wishful fantasy than reality.

They go back to watching the game.  The Kings make a couple spectacular outs: the left fielder Morano catches a wild pop fly with a spectacular dive into the grass, then throws the ball to third baseman Chang to tag a runner out as well.

It’s all a bit thrilling, and the Kings fans in the stands liven up from their doldrums with the hope that perhaps they can pull ahead after all.

But they won’t.  The Kings will still lose this game.

They keep playing anyway.

The crease in Jake’s forehead deepens, his grief again threatening to drag him under.  

Everyone on the station is dealing with loss in some way, but at least most people have closure of some type, or can work towards it (with Ezri’s help).  

At least Kira knows where Odo is, physically.  She could visit him if she needed to.  Jake can’t even do that.  Well, not that Kira _would_ visit; it’s too far and she has too much to do here.  Odo is part of the Link now.  Kira is running the station.  It’s over.  Odo said he wouldn’t come back, probably not ever, but Ben promised that _he_ would.  

Every day Ben Sisko’s baseball sits on her desk, reminding her that he’s returning some day, but the uncertainty, naturally, is weighing on Jake more than anyone.  Every day, the wormhole opens and closes, in full view where Jake can’t avoid reminders.  And he’s already tried commandeering a runabout to fly into the wormhole himself (not that it worked).  

“Didn’t you get some writer’s award to attend school on Earth?” Kira says.  “You could always go back there, get a fresh start.  No memories suffocating you.  Trust me, I know what that’s like.”

She hadn’t been on Terok Nor for long, back in the Occupation days, terrorizing Cardassian overseers and bristling with the rage and injustice of her youth, but it had been long enough.  Sometimes the scent of hot ore would still arise like a ghost from the station’s walls, and she could almost see the downtrodden slaves lining for a brief rest along the hallways.

A lush green island within transporter distance of his grandfather, at a school with professors that had been stationed far away from the frontlines of the war, and the breathing room to process and channel his emotions into his craft -- all this could be good for Jake.  

Kira’s almost jealous.  But Deep Space Nine needs her.  Bajor needs her.  Hell, the Cardassians need her.

“No one gets it!” Jake explodes out of his bleacher seat, restless energy rising up from nowhere all at once.  “Everyone else is just moving on like Dad’s on a vacation, or like he’ll come back tomorrow, but what if he’s -- if he’s gone forever.”  

Jake’s voice chokes on the last few words, and he turns away to pace back and forth along the row.

“What if -- what if he never watches baseball with me and Kasidy again.  What if he never cooks us gumbo.  No matter what I try in the kitchen, it doesn’t taste the same.  I use the same spices, I try to follow everything Grandpa taught me, but it’s never the same.  And what if he doesn’t get to meet my new baby sister after she’s born?”

“Wherever you are when he comes back, he’ll find you.  You don’t have to wait here in limbo.  He’ll find you,” Kira says, but Jake shakes his head with increasing intensity, dismissing her attempts at comfort.  

“Ever since my mom -- I’ve always been afraid that this could happen one day, or something like it.  That he’d be gone.  And he’d want me to move on and live my life, but I don’t -- I don’t know if I -- if I can -- ”

Jake crumbles back down into the chair, his face buried in the elbow crook of Ben’s oversized jersey as great heaving sobs wrack his body.

Kira sits down next to him.  She extends a cautious arm around his shoulders.  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeats, as if anything ever is.

It’s the seventh inning stretch.  Music fades in from a distance, cheery and bouncy as the crowd around them sings along to a traditional human jingle, from in a world entirely separate from where Kira and Jake huddle together.  

By the end of the song, Jake eventually quiets down, having released what he’d been bottling up.  He wipes his nose on a napkin and clears his throat.  “Sorry for ruining your evening, Nerys -- you didn’t come here after a long day expecting to have to --”

“It’s fine,” Kira says, waving it off.  “It’s okay, I promise.  We all need someone.”

He’s years older than Kira had been, when her father died, but he’s still so young.  Too young, but is anyone ever old enough to be able to deal with this?

“Do you --” Kira purses her mouth, hesitating to say more, but it tumbles out anyway.  “Do you feel like we -- like the Bajorans took Ben from you?  It’s okay if you do -- it was the prophets who called him to them, who needed him for Bajor.  Not just his ascendence, but the whole time Ben was here.  We as a people all wanted a piece of him, but maybe he should have been yours first."

"Of course not," Jake says without hesitation, his voice hoarse from crying.  He twists his mouth, then shrugs.  "Well, I only ever wanted my dad, not the Emissary or the Captain, that's true... and I would be lying if I weren’t sometimes irritated at how much everyone else needed him too.  But I’m proud of him."

"He’s proud of you too.  Anyone who knows him knows that."

"This was between my dad and the Prophets," Jake says.  "I don’t blame anyone.  There are so many others to blame for taking away people in this whole mess.  No use finding more."

"Don’t I know it," Kira says, thinking of all the people she misses so badly it aches.

Her father.  Her mother.  Her brothers.  Lupanza and Furel.

Tekony Ghemor.  Ziyal.  Jadzia.

Odo.

There's a moment of silence as a new pitcher takes the field for the next inning, Kira and Jake watch the field for a couple plays, side by side, not really paying attention to the game, but lost in thought instead.

As promised, the Kings lose.  Morano strikes for their third out, and the team sullenly packs up for the night.

But that's not how their story ends.  They have next season, a new challenge with fresh players.

Kira claps Jake on the shoulder as they exit the holosuite.

There are gaps in their lives now, and nothing's quite as it should be.  But they'll keep moving on, build a new community.

The game’s not over yet.


End file.
